Eurotrash

Synopsis

Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his eighty-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past.

Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair’s tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.

Author

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose work has been translated into thirty languages. His novels include Faserland, 1979, Imperium – which was the recipient of the Wilhelm Raabe literature prize, and one of Publisher’s Weekly ten best books of 2015 – and, most recently, The Dead, which won the Swiss Book Prize and the Hermann Hesse Award.